The future of work is going to be impacted by a multitude of forces: automation, AI, distributed workforces and more efficient tech. This, in turn, will have impacts on the talent acquisition, contracts, conditions and wages.
So what can be done to make sure your business is leveraging the opportunities, rather than running from them?
Automation
Automation isn’t just for manufacturing. Anyone using modern browsers and email systems will notice the suggested messages, auto-completes and “remember your details” options which offer to make sure individual users aren’t replicating effort or wasting time with individualised actions.
Automation for your business doesn’t need to be as wholesale or disruptive as you might think. Replacing the business telephone number with a smart web form is one of the most basic options utilised by many firms, or sending sales results directly to a Google Sheet shared across your whole team.
Thinking about where you can cut down on individual effort, can help your team focus on delivering the truly human touch, rather than wasting time on fielding unqualified leads or worse still, copy-pasting data.
Artificial Intelligence
Complex AI systems are often available as part of an SaaS offering, so needn’t be prohibitively expensive to leverage for your business. A good example would be the advertising algorithms offered as part of the usual AdWords, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter advertising platforms. These can be further “warmed up” with relevant data by using a pixel on your business website.
Distributed workforce
Many blue-chip companies have been moving their workforce to work-from-home arrangements with a central HQ for quarterly meetings or else a worldwide retreat meetup once a year.
Most companies have found the change management and re-tooling to be well worth the effort and this change accounts somewhat for the explosion in video chat and IM solutions from Google Meet to Slack and Zoom.
The key to managing a distributed workforce? Get plenty of devices out to your team and tool up with good communication software. Whether you’re on Salesforce or SAP, there’s are a plethora of consulting firms and technology partners with experience and software solutions to help your team work together online.
Talent acquisition
There’s an app for that. No, it’s true, talent acquisition has become better than ever, with more tools, platforms and methods of reaching the right candidate than ever before. If it still seems opaque after a trawl through the services available, then recruitment agencies are now easier to hire than ever before.
So whether you’re going solo with a job listing on LinkedIn, shopping out a small job on UpWork or going for high-end outsourcing on a service such as TopTal, there’s a digital service for every point in your talent acquisition journey.
Contracts, conditions and wages
Contracts, conditions and wages will change significantly as the job market shifts and heats up with the introduction of new technology. From micro-chipping employees to micro-contracting through the gig-economy, there will be challenges for employee rights and legislators.
Whether or not technology offers an improvement in conditions and wages will rely upon the starting point of the employee – often their domestic economy – and the industry in which they work. Clearly there are great opportunities within the tech, legal and human resources sectors for those who can compete on the global market.